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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25759051">Saint of Song</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/seastheday/pseuds/seastheday'>seastheday</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bardic Inspiration [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Final Fantasy XIV</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Spoilers, Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood Spoilers, Healthy Polyamory, Polyamory, Pre-Threesome, Unnamed Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), but it's kind of blink and you'll miss it, female WoL, kinda major spoiler for ARR, no betas we die like men</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:56:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,774</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25759051</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/seastheday/pseuds/seastheday</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>If Guydelot had, at some point, added inveterate gambler to the list of his “charms” he still wouldn’t have taken the bet that he would have ever managed to sleep with the Warrior of Light.  </p><p>And yet, after he actually meets her it feels almost <i>inevitable</i>.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Guydelot Thildonnet/Warrior of Light</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bardic Inspiration [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1868695</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Saint of Song</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>You ever set out to write a quick, dirty threesome and then end up writing a multiple part story that doesn't even feature the threesome until the very end?  No just me, huh?</p><p>Well, enjoy the fruits of it anyway.</p><p>(This will eventually be Guydelot/Sanson/f!WoL)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If Guydelot had, at some point, added inveterate gambler to the list of his “charms” he still wouldn’t have taken the bet that he would have ever managed to sleep with the Warrior of Light.  </p><p>And yet, after he actually meets her it feels almost <i>inevitable</i>.</p><p>From a distance, she makes climbing to heights he’d never dreamed of look easy, so much so that there’s no way he would ever have presumed to aspire to <i>hers</i>.  Oh, he’d dreamed of being in the God’s Quiver, obviously, of getting some kind of renown and making a name and a fortune for himself.  But reality and <i>that</i> dream had crashed into one another early on.  And once they had, why bother doing more than the bare minimum to stay employed?  Nothing was going to come of it anyway.  He needed enough money to keep a small room in Gridania and pay his bar tab when he actually had one.  He didn’t need much to survive and he needed so much more than the God’s Quiver ever offered to <i>live</i>, so the choice seemed easy, forgone.  Taverns didn’t pay for a new tunic when the old ones got holes in them, after all, but he couldn’t deny he both preferred them and <i>thrived</i> in them alike, far more so than the military ever offered.  He remembered when he used to be able to make a bow sing, but now, he prefers this harmony, a give and take dance true of any watering hole in the realm.</p><p>Bars tended to slide free drinks your way if you entertained their patrons, patrons tended to talk to you more if you bought them their ale.  The drunk tended to be freer with their tips and impressionable, attractive adventurers liked the mystery of a musician a fair deal more than a military man. Why sleep alone when you could take home the prettiest girl or boy in the room, literally for a song?  And what songwriter could lack for new material in such a place?  He could find his songs one night in a love ballad to a maiden’s smile or weave a naughtier ode later in the evening to her hips, breasts.  An encounter with a new adventurer with a wicked look in his eyes who promised to make <i>him</i> sing turns into an instrumental piece, seductive and a little forceful, with a rhythm to it that gets people beating tankards against tables before the end.  </p><p>He doesn’t kiss and tell, but he spins each encounter into musical candy floss, some sweet and some bawdy, some fine-spun, heroic tales and some barely disguised pornography, sung when he’s drunk on wine and so is everyone else, when it’s the part of the night where everyone becomes secret-teller and confidant both and the application of a few more <i>private</i> bits of poetry might give him an evening full of <i>new</i> inspiration.  He <i>lives</i> on music, when he can no longer live on dreams.  His music comes out of tangled sheets and plied secrets, his muses eating breakfast in his bed.  He’s never once thought to use it for <i>battle</i>.</p><p>Until he does.  And see, here’s the thing.  He can say all he wants how little he cares for the <i>military</i>, how much it chafes him to be given stupid orders by a bunch of meat-heads who see strings as things only to be plucked in the name of <i>killing</i>, but he lived through the Calamity, too.  He’s gone to bed without knowing if today was the day the morning didn’t come.  He’s woken to fire, burnt fingers still learning their bow calluses on debris.  Coated in soot and grime, he’s dragged friends and strangers alike from burning buildings.  He’d been barely more than a child, he <i>knows</i> that, but he still cannot help but be haunted by the thought of the ones he <i>could</i> have saved.  If he had been faster, if he could have held out longer before collapsing himself.  As much as the tavern brings <i>him</i> life, it grants no such privilege to anyone else, not at his hands anyway.  So if this new little group he hears about might stand a chance of <i>helping</i>, of preventing some other young elezen from having to live through their own nightmares, if it could be a chance for him to use this gift of his for something that <i>means</i> something, well… he has to at least try, doesn’t he?</p><p>He doesn’t know what Jehantel sees in him, but he’s glad he does.  And even though he never joins him for a night in the tavern (nor really any revelry, once Guydelot thinks about it), he never forbids Guydelot from spending his nights there, so long as it doesn’t impact his ability to be on the field in the morning.  He even forgives him a few times where amorous lovers over-kept him, so long as he’s honest about that being the reason.  Jehantel doesn’t exactly <i>explicitly</i> approve, but he encourages them all to find their inspiration wherever they see fit and, for the first time, there’s someone Guydelot actually finds himself respecting, <i>listening</i> to.</p><p>(Jehantel does, just the once, remind him that while reminding soldiers of who they fought for back home with his songs was never a bad thing, he might want to tone down some of the imagery.  Inspired soldiers fought better.  Soldiers made hot and bothered by a song about their lovers waiting for them was… less than desirable on the battlefield.)</p><p>Honestly, it’s enough.  To have a mentor who doesn’t see who he is as something to be beaten out of him, to be able to work towards using a gift to truly help those that need helping.  He doesn’t <i>need</i> anything else.  But then he meets <i>her</i>.</p><p>She’s the vaunted Warrior of Light, already hailed as a hero the realm over, the one who saved them from invasion, who prevented another Calamity, who has helped and saved so many.  She’s hardly the sort of person to be interested in <i>him</i>.  Everyone talks about her like she’s a saint walking through Eorzea, delivering packages and doing menial tasks with as much of a smile as she slays primals and pushes back the entirety of the Empire near-to single handedly.  Even knowing she’s also a Bard, he has no real true hope of meeting her and he wouldn’t even <i>think</i> to try to bed her…</p><p>Except that by the time she’s showing up in his story, she’s also a <i>wanted criminal</i> and there’s something <i>wicked</i> when she smiles, like being asked to help train members of one country’s military while she’s wanted by the other for <i>regicide</i> is a joke that she finds delightfully appealing.  She fights like a voidsent and sings like the Twelve themselves live in her throat and when Guydelot makes a joking pass at her over a celebratory ale the night after they first meet, she laughs at the effort and then <i>kisses him anyway</i>, hot and open-mouthed right there in the middle of the bar.  </p><p>“That was for <i>daring</i>,” she says, hot into the space between them, and Guydelot is dimly aware that people are <i>staring</i> (hell, <i>he’s</i> staring, wide-eyed, like he’s never kissed a woman before), but he doesn’t care.  </p><p>“I would dare a lot more for another kiss like <i>that</i>,” he quips back, because as unexpected as this song is, it’s one he knows the tune to and she may have caught him by surprise, but he <i>does</i> know how to play.  </p><p>“Do, then, and find out what happens,” her grin is <i>dangerous</i>, sharp as an arrow.  She’s <i>brilliant</i>.  Witty, beautiful, twice as alive as anyone Guydelot has ever met and she sings like a <i>goddess</i>.  How could he resist?  He leans in and kisses her again, bold as brass, and she pulls away after that, but not before dragging her tongue against his in a way that makes him <i>shudder</i>.</p><p>Come to find out “what happens” is that, much later, after they have said their goodnights and gotten back to her inn room, she ties him to the headboard with his <i>own belt</i>, teases him until he’s begging for her, and then rides him more like an animal than a man.  He wakes up with bruises on his wrists and down his chest, sore down to his bones, with her curled up asleep with her head on his chest like some kind of princess in a storybook.  </p><p>This, he realises with a shock, is <i>everything he has ever wanted</i>.</p><p>From there, it happens whenever she’s back in town from slaying primals or fighting dragons or saving orphans or whatever heroes do.  He falls for her.  Of course he does.  What choice is there but to love her?  But it’s not as though either of them have ever cared about what the other one does when they’re not around.  He hears rumors that she’s sleeping her way through the Ishgardian aristocracy and he doubts the rumors are wholly false even as he doubts also that they are wholly true.</p><p>(One rumor is true, though he may be the only one to know it for certain.  She comes to him <i>broken</i> one night and trusts him to put her back together.  He does his best, first in bed and then in music and, with her blessing, years and years later the song ends up the centerpiece of an opera performed by the Majestic Theatre Company.  He has a distinct feeling that the latter is, in the end, more soothing to her than the former.  But perhaps he sells his own participation in her story short.)</p><p>He finds inspiration for new songs while she’s gone (and a good deal of his coin, besides) in the common rooms and bedrooms of the inns of the world as he and Sanson follow her through it.  He follows eventually to the Ala Mhigan front as well, though he honestly cares less about the book itself and more about getting to sing more with her, both in and out of the bedroom.  He does what he does best to ply information out of a weary but exultant group of soldiers and freedom fighters and if for a time he more sings of the comforts of home to weary, battle-tired soldiers than he does offer that comfort in their beds, well… at least he’s not spoken for the night she comes to him and explains that she’s going to be leaving for a while.</p><p>She trusts him with the knowledge of her destination, far across the sea, and he feels the weight of the world resting on her shoulders far more keenly here than in Ishgard.  That world seems colder as well, for all that they are no longer in the snows and for the first time, he finds himself glad of his technical lower ranked position in the God’s Quiver, doesn’t envy Sanson his own position in the Serpents.  To fight on the field of battle for something you believe in was one thing, to watch friends and comrades perish in a slaughter when you could have single-handedly turned the tide of battle but didn’t make it there in time is a completely different one.  </p><p>He offers what comfort he can in the way that he does best and she accepts it, and he’s not so blind as to not understand what a <i>gift</i> she has given him, in trusting that he will offer, in trusting that what is offered is genuine and meant for her.  He’s seen how war sometimes hardens men, to a point where they no longer remember how to seek comfort.  That she still <i>does</i> is a mark of her strength, he thinks, and that she comes to him, trusts him, is an <i>honor</i>.</p><p>And then, when they are post-coital and curled in each other’s arms and they start weaving stories, as they usually do, she turns his whole world upside down in a completely unexpected way.</p><p>He’d been complaining about something petty: the search for the book, the climate here versus the Black Shroud, not to any real end but just because he knows she likes the sound of his voice, particularly when she can set her ear against his chest and listen to it from the source.  The conversation turns to a particularly <i>vitriolic</i> complaint about Sanson and something about it turns her from almost indolently relaxed across him to sitting up in open, honest confusion, </p><p>“Wait… You mean you’re not…?” she trails off and he can tell that it’s more in disbelief than because she either doesn’t know what to say or is afraid to say it.  (She’s never afraid to say <i>anything</i>.)</p><p>“Not… what?” he looks at her, honestly confused, trying to play back the last few seconds of conversation to figure out what she was on about and completely unable to even remember what he’d been saying.  It hadn’t been <i>important</i> ten seconds ago.</p><p>“<i>Sleeping together.</i>  I’d just presumed--”  He blinks in shock, </p><p>“What?  <i>Sanson</i>?  No!  No of course not!” the denial is immediate and <i>adamant</i>, but she looks <i>vexingly</i> unconvinced,  “I know very well where I’m not wanted, thank you.”  She looks at him, tips her head to the side, resembling nothing so much as a confused bird, </p><p>“Do you?  Have you not seen the way he looks at you?”</p><p>“What, like I’m a nuisance?”</p><p>“Like you’re a <i>puzzle</i>,” she corrects, but he shakes his head in denial, </p><p>“Oh yes, that’s <i>much</i> sexier, thank you for clarifying.”  She smacks him on the shoulder and there’s a few minutes where they’re not talking anymore so much as doing something between play wrestling and kissing.  She finally pushes him back with a breathless laugh to continue, </p><p>“Fine, fine, maybe not like a puzzle.  Like... “ she thinks for a long moment while he goes halfheartedly for the ticklish spot on her sides and she also half-heartedly bats him away, “Hmm… like he doesn’t quite know what to do with you.  Like you’re not like anyone else he’s ever known.”  There’s suddenly a wicked gleam in her eyes, “Mm, I see you protest <i>entirely</i> too much.  At least one part of you is honest.”</p><p>He’s a relatively young man in bed with a naked, beautiful woman that he is madly in love with every single part of.  Of <i>course</i> he’s in a near constant state of low level arousal.  So it’s not as though he’s only recently gotten hard having this conversation or anything.  But when she says that he replays the last few seconds in his mind and… well, alright, yes, his dick, trapped against her thigh by their positions had definitely twitched in interest when she’d said <i>not like anyone else</i>.  He flushes, but refuses to be cowed, </p><p>“Sanson is straight as a board and as boring as one besides.  There’s no way he’s even remotely interested in me.  I’d be surprised if he’s interested in <i>anyone</i> and if he was going to be interested in anyone, it’d probably be Vorsaile or somebody.  Except he’s far too honorable to sleep up the ranks.”  he looked back at her, expecting to have been interrupted by now and his cock is <i>definitely</i> interested in the grin on her face, the wicked one that promises she’s about to do something he’s <i>really</i> going to like.</p><p>“I’ll take that bet,” she grins wider and <i>Twelve</i> but he loves her, “This isn’t the time or the place, I have to leave tomorrow.  But give me a <i>single chance</i> and I’ll get him in bed with both of us and he’ll beg you to fuck him before the end of the night without me involved in the slightest.  Deal?”</p><p>“When you lose--”</p><p>“<i>If</i> I lose, and I won’t,” she corrects.</p><p>“<i>When</i> you lose,” he insists, “what are the terms of this bet?”  She thinks for a moment, then grins again, </p><p>“Long weekend in a suite at the Gold Saucer?  The loser pays <i>and</i> has to wear whatever the winner wants all weekend.  If <i>I</i> win, we book it for three.”  His traitor cock knows precisely what it thinks about <i>that</i>, too, and he huffs in mock annoyance when she giggles about it.</p><p>“Fine.  I accept your terms,” he dips his head down low, lips brushing against the shell of her ear, “But only because then you have to come back to me safely in order to lose.”  She doesn’t have the same obvious physical tells, but the way she shudders against him is a full story all the same.</p><p>“Perfect,” she murmurs back, just before Guydelot changes the subject quite thoroughly for the rest of the morning.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to everyone at <a href="https://discord.gg/enabling-debauched-xivfic">Emet-Selch's Wholesomely Debauched Bookclub</a> for the motivation to actually write something and post it for the first time in a few years and for screaming with me about bard husbands.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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